The Influence of Mary on Society
[Reposted]
IT’S interesting how rarely feminists mention the most powerful and influential woman in history.
She has been adored, prayed to, depicted in paintings and sculptures that fill museums and churches around the world; praised in exquisite hymns and some of the greatest compositions known to man; honored in countless, majestic buildings with soaring interiors that rank as some of the most beloved buildings on earth; written about in many thousands of books, including profound treatises cherished through the centuries, and held high in the hearts of untold millions ranging from peasants to kings. The woman known as the Virgin Mary’s prominent role in world affairs is undeniable.
And yet when the case for the historic oppression of women is made, she is almost never mentioned. This is odd, given that Mary, unlike the ancient goddesses who were also adored and honored in art, was a real woman who lived at a specific period in history. She was never claimed by those devoted to her to be a divinity or a product of poetic imagination.
Feminists surely ignore or downplay her because she, a woman, is arguably the single, greatest enemy of the feminist narrative of history. She is the supreme, unparalleled example of femininity. From The Influence of Mary on Modern Civilization, by Rev. John Kelly (1897):
And this ideal of a delicate, fragile, modest and retiring lady, overtopping in her grandeur the sons of men, yet retaining supereminently a woman’s heart, has done more towards banishing the barbarism, allying the brutality, softening the hardness, developing the humanity of the native disposition bequeathed to Adam’s children, than all the teachings of philosophers, and all the projects and devices of statesmen and sages. [“The Influence of Mary on Modern Civilization,” Rev. John Kelly, 1897]
Perhaps women were more than mere slaves of men before Mary, but there is no question Mary elevated them and that she played a major part in the greatest of all civilizations. While feminism says women become powerful by seeking positions of power, Mary’s example shows that women become powerful by embracing humility and submission to the Will of God. We will never know how many people were born into this world purely because of this example as she has exalted motherhood and its sacrifices. The decline of devotion to her parallels the decline of the Western birthrate.
In the remnants of chivalry today, we can find a form of deference and respect which never existed in non-Christian societies. Rev. Kelly again:
The knights indeed of mediaeval days have passed in their gleaming armour, with nodding plume and twinkling lance-head, into the shadows of the melancholy past; but that sworn courtesy to the weaker sex, that sweet simplicity of heart, in doing them honour; that self-forgetful devotion to the cause of the oppressed and the helpless, that vowed reverence and affection for Mary’s name, which reigned in their hearts and dictated all their duties and functions of honour, kindliness and true knighthood did not die with them, but fructified through the ages, the same essential spirit in other outward forms.
This was due largely to Mary’s influence. She has been a stimulus to the cultivation of virtue and perfection for both men and women:
Yes, beloved Brethren, the love of Mary, the study of Mary’s character and the imitation of her virtues, is no debasing influence, as her enemies pretend, rather it is a stimulus to every good quality that owns a root in the soil of our nature. She is the woman, who (according to the first recorded prophecy), was marked out in the designs of God to crush the serpent’s head. And in the breasts of her faithful children and votaries, her heel is upon that malignant crest, and the poisonous tongue of Satan plays vainly in his jaws.
Pope Pius XII similarly wrote in his allocution, Woman in the Modern World, of September 1941:
If life reveals to what depths of vice and degradation women can at times descend, Mary shows to what heights she can climb, in and through Christ, even to ascending above all other creatures. What civilization, what religion has ever raised to such heights the ideal of womanhood, or exalted it to such perfection? Modern humanism, laicism, Marxist propaganda .. non-Christian cults, have nothing to offer which can even be compared with this vision .. so glorious and so humble, so transcendent and [yet] so easily accessible.
May she be honored and adored throughout the world.
May the prayer of the Mother of God assist thy people, O Lord; though we know her to have passed out of this world, may we experience her intercession for us with thee in the glory of heaven. Through the same Lord, &c.
— Secret, Mass of the Feast of the Assumption of Our Lady, St. Andrew’s Missal